Notes from the Consultant’s Jungle

When recently interviewed for a magazine article, I was asked about Green initiatives by data center operators.  There are lots of innovative techniques for reducing power consumption in data centers, and lots of ways to apply renewable resources.  The fact of the matter is that for the data center operator, some of the options are [...]

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As I’ve watched the momentum of the Cloud, it’s caused me to reflect upon earlier discussions about data center physical security.  It’s long been my opinion that physical security will soon emerge (or re-emerge) as a top issue in data center planning, since businesses and consumers alike are increasingly reliant on the data and transaction [...]

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The challenge in using green energy alternatives such as wind or solar power in data centers is power density.   Data centers consume a lot of power with respect to their physical footprint, so they need very large solar arrays or large wind turbine farms to generate the necessary power for the facility.  Consequently, the amount [...]

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Many firms have gone looking for core/shell property with the intent of renovating these structures for use as a data center.  These projects are very capital intensive, and in many cases the benefits of having the existing structure are almost nil when viewed in the context of the broader project plan and budget.  However, many [...]

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Well, now I know why I’ve never come out on top whenever I buy one of Jim Cramer’s recomendations.
In a recent (10/22/2009) Mad Money piece on CNBC, Jim Cramer used the Equinix acquisition of Switch and Data to make the point that data centers are obsolete.  In his diatribe about why anyone with Equinix stock [...]

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When launching a new data center build project, where the data center will be located is a fundamental issue. There are many factors in deciding where the data center will be, but all of these factors can arguably be consolidated into two issues- Risk and Cost.
We mention risk in terms of Risk Management. [...]

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This year’s Cloud World conference was a mashup of three industry conferences-  Open Source World, Next Generation Data Center (NGDC), and Cloud World.  Even with the combining of three (formerly) major industry events, the attendance volume still only merited the West wing of the Moscone Center.
It’s easy to blame the low attendance on the economy, [...]

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I attended the 2009 IT Roadmap Conference in Atlanta,
Georgia this week and sat in on the presentation by
Johna Till Johnson of Nemertes Research, entitled
“Building a Resilient Dynamic Data Center.” The presentation
was a summary of hundreds of hours of discussions
with data center operators and enterprises with [...]

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Posted by Bob Landstrom
Enterprises have embraced the data center tier classification system developed by the Uptime Institute for evaluating their own data center facilities and those of potential colocation and hosting providers.
The subject of facility availability has matured over recent years.  The mind set has matured from recognition that existing IT facilities were a problem [...]

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Regular readers of this blog will know that we are strong advocates of container data centers as a step toward modular data center design and as a facility component for extremely dense data processing.  Earlier posts talked about 2008 as a breakout year for containers (it wasn’t) and containers used as facility components in cargo [...]

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